


time to kill

by dirtybinary



Series: Murder Burgers [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Amnesia, Brainwashing, M/M, POV Bucky Barnes, Suicidal Thoughts, background Peggy Carter/Steve Rogers - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-26
Updated: 2015-10-26
Packaged: 2018-04-28 06:16:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,362
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5080849
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dirtybinary/pseuds/dirtybinary
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve doesn't go down with the plane. Consequently, the Winter Soldier spends seventy years thwarting, and being thwarted by, a blond stranger who shows up at all his missions and keeps buying him food.</p><p>Or: the one with the arch-nemeses and their murder burgers.</p>
            </blockquote>





	time to kill

When the Soldier reaches the diplomat’s house, an unmarked beige car is already idling across the street, and the blond man is in it.

“Hop in, Buck,” says the man. His smile is like all other smiles: a habitual upward movement of the lips in response to certain social stimuli, which in itself has no real meaning. “Might as well.”

It is also like no other smile--gentle, unthreatening, signalling resignation underlaid by half a dozen softer things for which the Soldier has no name. _Fight him_ , says the Soldier’s brain, the seat of reason and conscious thought. _Shoot him. Kill him._

But his hands do not shoot the man. That is not how the game is played. Operating on what has to be muscle memory, going against every pulse of alarm radiating from his limbic system, he opens the passenger door and slips into the car beside the man.

  
  


Like most other SHIELD agents, the man has had a succession of names. Jack. Ross. Danny. It is different every time. The Soldier does not bother to keep track of his perfunctory disguises, all worn without conviction. Instead he only ever calls the man Steve. This is not one of the made-up identities, at least not one that he can remember, only a random name fished out of the more obscure archives of episodic memory and arbitrarily attached to this particular face.

“You just look like a Steve,” he told the man once, in petulant defiance. It was their first meeting, or maybe their latest, or one of those in between; it is impossible to tell. The Soldier does not like trying to remember things. He does recall the man looking pained, with that troubled crease between his golden brows, but that might just have been because they were trying to stab each other at the time.

(They are always fighting. There is nothing personal about it. It is just the way they are made, like game pieces: the ivory queen and the ebony one, facing each other across a chessboard checkered with bombings and assassinations and wars fought by proxy. As far as the Soldier knows, which is not very far at all, it has always been this way and will always be.)

One day, perhaps, he will outmanoeuvre Steve and his bullets will hit home, and he will stand, triumphant, gladiatorial, and watch the life bleed out of him. When the day comes, HYDRA will have no further use for their Soldier, and he will step into the cryo tank for the last time and watch the lid slide shut over him, like a toy put away for good when a child grows up. A simulated death, without the peaceful finality of the real thing.

Perhaps that is why he never tries very hard to kill Steve.

  
  


Today Steve has a burger for him, and a carton of chilled orange juice. Steve always has food, and the Soldier always eats it. Maybe he refused the first time, trusting to common sense and combat instincts, assuming that the stuff was laced with poison. But he is still alive and he is always hungry and so, these days, he takes whatever he is offered without question. “Haven’t seen you all year,” says Steve, starting in on a burger of his own. “You been asleep?”

“Maybe,” says Bucky airily. Today he will go by Bucky. He is Bucky whenever he accepts Steve’s food, a Persephone enthroned, lips stained scarlet and vermilion with Hades’s pomegranate seeds. Like Steve, he has proffered any number of false names over the years, but none of them ever stuck. Perhaps Steve, too, has problems with his memory.

“They been treating you well in there?”

“Yeah,” says Bucky. Steve asks him this every time. He must answer in the affirmative, or else Steve gets sad lines around his eyes and tries to get Bucky to run away with him. Or maybe it was just that one time. Bucky had told him thanks but no thanks, they barely knew each other, they’d just shared a few meals and thwarted each other some and didn’t Steve think he was being a bit too forward? And Steve had moped for a while, but if he ever asked again, Bucky doesn’t recall.

This time Steve presses his luck. “You got orders to shoot the diplomat?”

“I got lotsa orders,” says Bucky. “You gonna offer me some of those fries, or just ask me dumb questions?”

Steve grimaces, and shoves the pack of fries into his hands. They are soggy and cold, but Bucky eats them anyway. They’re better than anything his handlers will feed him. Still chewing, he takes the lead in their mutual interrogation. “You the one who blew up our Hokkaido base last winter?”

Steve’s brows go up. “What did they tell you?”

“That some huge blond fella busted through the front door with a dinner plate and set off the self-destruct system,” says Bucky. “I only know one huge blond fella with a dinner plate, so I figured it was you.”

“Assumptions are dangerous things,” says Steve blandly. Even with his inexplicable fondness for Bucky, he never gives a direct answer. Something about fraternising with the enemy, and threatening national security, and such. But after a moment he says, “I was hoping you’d be there.”

Bucky says nothing. Of the two of them, he is by far the better inquisitor. Steve adds, “I’m glad you weren’t.”

Steve is a living contradiction on graceful ballet-dancer legs. Bucky understands this. That is why they are having supper together as they wait for their target to arrive, a human being one of them wants to kill and the other will try to save. As Steve puts it, they might as well.

Bucky doesn’t question it. He outgrew childish questions long ago.

  
  


This is how it goes:

The diplomat pulls up outside her house fifteen minutes late. The Winter Soldier (no longer Bucky, because he is done eating) draws his pistol with deliberate slowness, giving Steve more than enough time to catch his wrist and yank it down. While his adversary is thus occupied, he reaches for the remote switch in his pocket with his free hand and triggers the bomb he stuck under the diplomat’s car last night.

He could have activated it earlier. The range on these things is pretty impressive. But, as he will later explain to his handlers, he wanted her to be close enough that Steve would see it happen. So that Steve could sprint across the road during the three seconds or so that it would take the bomb to detonate, and try to save her, and get himself killed in the process. _I thought_ , he will say, all cold-eyed logic, _that you would like that._

But mostly he just wants to give Steve a fighting chance.

  
  


The diplomat dies. Steve does not.

So everything falls out according to plan, more or less.

  
  


He keeps trying to ask his handlers for intel on Steve. Only he doesn’t use the misnomer _Steve_ , which is only a label of convenience--sloppy emotional shorthand for something impossible to pigeonhole, and heaven forfend the Winter Soldier be either sloppy or emotional. _Captain America_ , he will say, or _the target_ , or _that one fella who shows up at all my missions._

They tell him things sometimes. Factual, objective knowledge that fits neatly into the appropriate blanks in his memory, and can be unplugged again just as easily once the mission is over. Abraham Erskine’s little guinea pig turned supersoldier. Six foot two, 240 lbs, blond hair, blue eyes. (Cornflower blue, robin’s-egg blue, the Soldier will resist the urge to append to the man’s official file.) Superhuman strength and speed. Enhanced healing. Vibranium shield. Pushed you out of a train that one time. Just one of the many unethical weapons Stark and Carter are using to destabilise the world; so you see why he must be destroyed, don’t you?

“What train?” he will ask. Or, wrinkling up his forehead, “That’s not how I remember it.”

And then there are sympathetic looks all around, and gentle hands squeezing his ungentle ones, and they tell him, _No, no, of course not, the trauma played such hell on your brain, it’s no wonder your memories are all wrong._

Sometimes he believes them, and sometimes he doesn’t. In the greater scheme of things, it hardly matters. The past is unreliable and the present tedious beyond hope, so he builds for himself future after imagined future in the long periods of downtime between missions, frivolous sandcastles on fast-eroding beaches. He will see Steve again. They will fight, and as usual, neither of them will win. Other people will die, tally marks on either HYDRA’s side of the board or SHIELD’s, and somewhere amid the chaos he and Steve will snatch a few minutes to chat over a meal. He will ask incriminating questions and Steve’s terrible poker face will give away all the answers; and then he will forget Steve until their next encounter and it will begin anew.

It’s not much of a life, but it sure beats the alternative.

  
  


The next time they meet, it is because Steve climbs lizard-like into the Soldier’s hotel room at three in the morning, his backpack reeking of grease and salt. The Soldier comes awake at once, knife in palm, servos humming, stomach rumbling. He is never fed enough. “I didn’t order room service.”

Steve grins, stepping neatly over the tripwire under the window. He settles at the foot of the bed without waiting for an invitation, the mattress creaking under his warm weight. He puts his shield on the floor where the Soldier can see it, and the Soldier does the same with his knife. He has a couple more pistols tucked away on his person, but no doubt Steve does, too. “I brought steak,” Steve says. “And baked potatoes.”

The Soldier pulls a face that, in the twilit darkness of the room, he is not sure Steve will see. “I wanted burgers.”

“You always want burgers,” says Steve. Placidly, methodically, he unpacks paper plates and cartons and lays them out on the rumpled covers between them. Neither of them makes any move to turn on the lights. “It’s unhealthy.”

“Murder burgers,” Bucky insists, only half-heartedly, since his mouth is already full of potatoes and peas. Greedy Persephone again, and an underworld waiting to be ruled.

Steve sighs. “Next time.”

Bucky catalogues his features as they eat, mostly in silence. There is a pallid yellow bruise over his right eye, which--going by Steve’s inhuman rate of healing--must have happened this morning at the earliest. Older than that, and even more faded, is a puckered white knot in the creamy skin between neck and left shoulder. Bucky points to that one. A graze from a bullet, maybe. “Did I do that?”

Maybe it matters to him, or maybe it doesn’t; or maybe he is only trying to annoy Steve by not knowing things that ought to be obvious. He watches the familiar frown ripple over Steve’s face. “No, you shot me in the _right_ shoulder. And that was last year, the scar faded ages ago.”

Bucky glowers. Times like these, he hates Steve with a fervour as all-consuming as it is irrational. “I keep all the ones you give me.”

As if to compensate for his sieve-like mind, his body does not relinquish any of its scars. He no longer remembers how he acquired any of them, but there is one on his flesh bicep that could have been made by the rim of a round object thrown with great force. He tugs up the sleeve of his sweatshirt and points to it. “Like this one.”

The accusation is meant to hurt, and it does. Steve puts down his fork with a clatter. “You know, I wouldn’t have to fight you if you didn’t keep trying to kill people.”

“I’m not here to kill anyone this time,” Bucky points out. “You are.”

“Yeah, an agent who’s going to blow up a U.N. summit--”

“An agent _you_ think is going to blow up a U.N. summit,” Bucky corrects him. Steve is always so convinced he is right. He is the sort of man who gets into one’s head, whose words so easily fall onto the fallow fields of a careless mind and sprout weeds of doubt. “What if your intel’s unreliable?”

With satisfaction, he watches Steve squirm. Bucky has no particular liking for his employers, but he obeys their directives because they are the only purpose he knows. He is beginning to suspect that Steve sometimes feels the same way about his own job. “When you get like this,” Steve says, his jaw more square than usual, “you make me want to stab you with a fork.”

“Try,” says Bucky.

They do fight, then, rolling off the bed and tussling on the carpet with cutlery and bare hands, though not for long. There is no point in risking injury before the bomber has even shown up; and besides, they still have half a steak to finish. “One day,” Steve says, panting, as they tumble apart, “I’m gonna bring you in.”

“Nah,” says Bucky. His hair, now long enough to curl inwards at the nape of his neck, is falling across his eyes. It is a bit like looking at Steve through the slats of a prison cell; though from this perspective, either of them could be the prisoner. “You don’t trust SHIELD enough for that. You’d just kill me.”

Steve’s mouth twists. A smile like all other smiles, and no other. “Probably.”

  
  


They fight again the day the bomber is due to arrive, and while they are both distracted, young Natashenka walks in and blows up the summit just like they planned. The Soldier is proud of her. He would be proud of himself, too, if he hadn’t glimpsed the quiet, disappointed rage in Steve’s eyes.

They don’t see each other for twenty years.

  
  


“You ever gonna retire?” Bucky asks when they meet again, finally, inevitably, at the turn of the century. It is the last ten minutes of the year and they are in a swanky restaurant in midtown Manhattan, because why the hell not. He still has some time to go before extraction, and he figures he owes Steve a meal after eating his food and screwing up his protection details all these years. Besides, he likes wasting Alex’s money.

“Nope,” says Steve, across their tiny and exorbitantly priced servings of carbonara. Bucky’s hands keep trying to deposit more food on Steve’s plate when neither of them is looking. “You?”

For an answer, Bucky laughs in his face. Steve does the same, matching to perfection the hollow, off-key timbre of the Soldier’s mirth. He still looks twenty-five, maybe thirty at most. His eyes are older; but eyes, Bucky thinks, make up only a small percentage of the human body, and do little to raise the weighted mean. “No kids?” asks Bucky.

Steve goes still, his fork halfway between his plate and his mouth. “No.”

“Damn,” says Bucky, blithely cheerful, because the momentary defensiveness that flitted across Steve’s face was more hurtful than he cares to admit. “I gotta look elsewhere for a hostage, then.”

Steve rolls his eyes, shoulders relaxing again. “Try my wife. If you dare.”

He reaches into his shirt pocket and pulls out an ancient compass, so grubby and battered it might have been shat out through the tail end of a world war. It probably was. He flicks it open, and there she is in vivid reds and blues, the retired Director of SHIELD with her hair leaching to silver, her eyes still bright with danger and mischief, her subtle smile edged like a diamond. Something twinges in Bucky’s stomach, the ghost of a pain only half exorcised.

Steve has been watching his face with something like avid hunger. “You okay?”

“Huh?”

“You flinched.” Steve puts the compass away, his movements too careful to be casual. Bucky wonders what sort of reaction he had been hoping for. “Do you know her?”

The silence stretches taut between them, only to snap when people start shouting somewhere close by. Not fearful shouts, but hearty ones, a raucous and merry countdown. Distantly, Bucky remembers that it is New Year’s Eve, that they have reached the frontier of a capriciously selected chunk of time. He recovers the same way he would dodge a bullet, all flying fists and rolling bravado. “Oh, yeah. I tried to kill her once.” He points at the painful place over his ribs. “I still got the scar.”

Steve laughs. This time it is almost genuine. “Good.”

Overhead, fireworks go off in a deafening arrhythmia of snaps and crackles, the death throes of a millennium. Now it is Steve who flinches, and on instinct Bucky bumps his knee under the table in reassurance. Muscle memory again, pesky as always. They do not speak until it is over.

  
  


“But maybe I’m married too,” says Bucky into his mic. He’s hacked into Steve’s comms to eavesdrop on what SHIELD HQ is telling him, but somehow he did it wrong, so Steve can hear sounds from his end as well. “Might be I married Natalia and neither of us remembers.”

A puff of static, as Steve exhales too close to the receiver. “Nah. You’d have mentioned it.”

“I should start telling you these things,” says Bucky. This time he hasn’t eaten anything of Steve’s, but for such an occasion, it seems proper to use the name nonetheless. They are stationed on rooftops on opposite sides of the same laboratory, spying on the same chemical engineer through what is probably the same brand of rifle scope, and it feels just as intimate as sharing a meal. Maybe more so. “You’d keep track for me.”

“I could,” says Steve. He sounds so distracted, distant even, that Bucky has to peer into his scope to check that the target hasn’t moved from his desk. “But then you’d have to start believing things I tell you.”

“I usually do,” says Bucky, adjusting his tripod. “You’re a shitty undercover agent. I’m not even sure how you’re still alive.”

“That’s your fault,” says Steve. “You’re pretty much the only agent in the field who can kill me, until the next time someone burgles the Stark vault.” A pause. “Besides, I’m not really undercover. Not when I’m with you.”

“Oh, that’s rich coming from someone who threw me out a train.”

Something makes a thunk on Steve’s end, loud and sharp in the hushed stillness of the rooftop. “You _fell_ out of the goddamn train. I keep telling you that. You believed me last time.”

“That’s ‘cause there was ice cream last time,” says Bucky. “Anyway, who the fuck falls out of a train?”

“Trust me, I ask myself that every day.”

“Ah, shut it, Rogers.”

Bucky shifts, trying to get comfortable. This should be a simple if boring mission. All he needs to do is wait for the engineer’s secretary to leave the lab, and then he and Steve will race each other to the kill shot. It’s nice, having the same objective for once. Maybe afterwards they can grab milkshakes or something. “By the way,” Bucky says, “I think she’s gonna go over.”

“The secretary?”

Bucky rolls his eyes at empty air. “Natashenka. To SHIELD. Be nice, okay?”

A pause. Bucky wishes he could see Steve’s face, even if there is a significant risk that it would distract him from the task at hand. “Come over as in pretend to surrender and strangle us all in our sleep, or really come over?”

“Really go over,” says Bucky. “She’s tired of never remembering anything. And she’s been putting off killing that archer fella of yours for years now.” _Just like how I’ve been putting off killing you_ , he thinks but does not say aloud. “Just. Look out for her.”

“You know I will,” says Steve. In the lab, a woman in heels and an office dress is emerging from a cubicle, her purse slung over her shoulder. “Buck?”

“Yeah?”

“You ever get tired of not remembering anything?”

“Don’t try to distract me.” Bucky leans over, checks the scope again. The engineer is still at work, hunched at his desk between three whirring computers. The angle is just right for a shot straight between the eyes. Admittedly, he’s showing off a little. Even Steve will have to be impressed. “I remember you. That’s bad enough.”

“Aww,” says Steve. “You can’t see, but I’m blushing.”

“Shut up.”

Steve laughs, languid and indulgent. “Go ahead. Make the kill. I got a shitty angle.”

Bucky hesitates, his hands frozen on the rifle. “Really?”

“Yeah,” says Steve. “You’re the better shot. Nick and Peg won’t care either way as long as the asshole dies.” A few seconds of dead air. When he speaks again, his voice sounds different. “‘Sides, maybe if you impress your bosses, they’ll feed you properly for once.”

“What’s that to you?” asks Bucky, his pride raising its hackles. Then he remembers that Steve may be very much like him, his only true equal and counterpart, but they are different in just as many ways. Steve has all his memories and he can eat whenever he likes and he does not scar and maybe, just maybe, one day his golden hair will turn to silver like his wife’s and he will retire. He can afford to be gracious, to give up a kill shot now and then.

“Yeah, okay,” says Bucky, without waiting for an answer. Whatever Steve has to say, it will be unbearable to hear. “Thanks.”

He takes the shot. It isn’t even a difficult one, but all the same, Steve lets out a low whistle of appreciation when the engineer dies.

  
  


“Rogers won’t shut up about you,” SHIELD’s newest agent tells him. Natalie, Natasha, Natalia. Propped up against the smoking debris of her car and bleeding out through the GSW in her abdomen, and still looking for ways to hurt and confound, a fighter to the last. “Every single goddamned mission it’s Bucky this, Bucky that. Either kill him or let him kill you already, I’m sick of it."

He holds a bottle of water to her parched lips, bunches up a fresh rag and stuffs it into her clammy palm so she can press it to her wound. The archer will be here with backup any moment. He should leave. He can’t leave. “What does he say?”

Her mouth curves with a wicked, ruthless smile. Tash, Tasha, Natashenka, not on his side for the first time in their long lives. “I’m not a double agent, James. I only carry secrets one way now.”

He doesn’t press her. It serves him right, really.

  
  


He knows she survives because a month later, a parcel turns up on the doorstep of the safe house he’s staying at, a house no one ever used but the two of them. He dons goggles and gloves and a respirator before he opens it, but all it contains is a heavy hardcover book still smelling of new paper. The front reads THE HOWLING COMMANDOS: A BIOGRAPHY, and beneath that, _Foreword by Prof. Gabriel Jones._

Seven men in sepia tones and mismatched uniforms stare from the cover into the intermediate distance, stiffly posed and bashfully heroic. One of them is Steve. One of them is Bucky. None of them are strangers, though they ought to be.

He sets the book on fire and mails its remains to Natasha at her new address.

  
  


“Hey,” he says, the next time he runs into Steve. “Did we ever fuck?”

Steve looks up, eyes round, cheeks bulging with an inadvisably large mouthful of bagel. “What?”

They are pulling out of a Dunkin’ Donuts drive-thru. It’s Steve’s fault, really. He’d jumped on the roof of the getaway car just as Bucky was speeding off from what was supposed to be a quick assassination under deep shadow conditions, and knocked out the Soldier’s entire backup crew, most of whom are now lying on the highway three exits back in varying degrees of consciousness. Bucky doesn’t really mind. He never liked his team much, and what with aliens invading New York and all, he hasn’t seen Steve in a while. “Before you dumped me out the train and left me to die,” he says. “Or maybe after. I dunno. All the stakeouts and ambushes and trying to slaughter each other, there must’ve been loads of time to kill.”

“For the last time, I didn’t--”

“Yeah, whatever, who cares, I’m just messin’ with you.”

In recent years, Steve has stopped wearing his heart on his face. It must be Natasha’s influence. He shrugs, his expression unreadable. “I did leave you to die, though. That one’s on me.”

“Shove it, I _said_ I’m just messin’ with you.” Bucky pulls over in a quiet parking lot and kills the engine, takes a bite out of a donut. It’s pretty good, and he tears it in half and throws the larger chunk at Steve. “So did we?”

“Hm,” says Steve with an air of thoughtfulness, as he snatches the donut out of the air and crams it into his mouth. “Name me some of your new bosses and maybe we’ll talk.”

Bucky grins. “Really? You wanna play spy poker? You’re no good at lying, Stevie.”

Steve smiles that smile of his. It speaks volumes, but maybe Bucky is illiterate. “I could use the practice.”

“Well, if you insist,” says Bucky. “My bosses. Here goes.” He puts on his blankest, deadest-eyed face, the one Alex likes to see and Steve does not, and aims his blows with diabolical precision. “Carter, Margaret. Fury, Nicholas. Stark, Anthony.”

“Nice try,” says Steve. His faith, as always, is annoyingly unshakeable. “My wife, her protégé, and our honorary nephew. You’d think I would’ve noticed.”

“Damn,” says Bucky, without much heat. He hadn’t been expecting a reaction in any case. “Your turn. Do your worst.”

Steve doesn’t miss a beat. “Yeah, we fucked.”

Bucky starts to laugh, and regrets it at once when he nearly chokes on his donut. There is a very specific death he wants to die when the time comes (a bullet through the back of the head, preferably shot by Steve or Natasha, since no one else can be trusted not to botch it), and mouthfuls of sugary pastry do not come into it. “Shit, man. You’re still terrible at lying.”

“I am,” says Steve. He is not smiling. “That’s why I didn’t bother.”

  
  


The next time the Soldier runs into Steve, he abandons the mission and heads right back to base for punishment.

  
  


When the day comes, when the chessboard is emptying and checkmate looms large over the final moves of the game, the end is neither quick nor painless.

There is a secret he wears like a talisman over his heart, an unexpected boon from his handlers that he will take to his grave. Out of the twenty million targets in Project Insight’s database, the first name is _Rogers, Steven Grant_ (and hey, look at that, the guy really is a Steve), and the last, appended to the bottom like an afterthought, is _Barnes, James Buchanan_. He asked to be on the list, begged and coaxed and reasoned, pointing out that HYDRA will not need him--their most cumbersome of assets--now it has its helicarriers, and then somehow Alex stumbled over one of his unexpected pockets of faux-compassion and allowed him to add his name.

This is the end for him, then, long-awaited and much-postponed; and as he trades blows with Steve aboard the final helicarrier, he does not miss the irony of it all, that he is fighting to the death for the right to die.

He does not pull his punches, because he respects Steve as an adversary, and because he is--for once--impelled to fight not only by vague loyalty and knee-jerk obedience, but a terrible and intensely personal desperation. Better an automated bullet than an endless freeze, haunted always by the possibility of another thaw. What he does not expect, but ought to have, is that Steve does not fight to kill. So instead of a swift, cleansing K.I.A., there is this: fearful nights shot through with dreams and memories and fantasy, a haystack search for needling answers, the cosmic loneliness that comes from being off the leash and truly alone for the first time he can remember. The helicarriers have fallen and Alex’s dream is dead and all the Insight names are drifting like flotsam and jetsam through cyberspace, Steve and Bucky, Rogers and Barnes, doomed to meet again and again as long as the currents keep them moving.

And so they live to share another meal, eating terrible sushi from a take-out box behind the convenience store Bucky has just tried to rob, and Steve has prevented him from robbing.

“I was hungry,” Bucky protests. They have always fought over missions and orders. Now they are clashing over Bucky’s own choices, and Bucky feels the need to give an excuse, to explain if not justify himself to Steve. “I wasn’t gonna hurt anybody, just grab some food and cash.”

“You could’ve just asked me,” says Steve.

“I asked you to come stop me,” says Bucky. “That’s the same thing.”

The sun is going down. They are sitting on the asphalt, which is still warm, and the stench of exhaust fumes from Steve’s new bike is oddly comforting. “I decided to continue my webcomic,” says Steve. “I told you about it last time. You won’t remember.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah,” says Steve. In the last light of the evening, his hair catches the sun and flares like a beacon, glinting old gold and young dandelion and half a dozen shades in between. The wasabi stings at Bucky’s eyes. “And I’ve been taking graphic design classes.”

He sounds like a retiree, or maybe a college student, set free to explore the world for the first time. “What’s it like?” Bucky asks.

“Fun,” says Steve. “Not nearly life-threatening enough, but I’ll get used to that.”

The conversation has plainly arrived at Bucky’s turn. He casts about for something to say, something to convince Steve he fills his days with more edifying pastimes than petty theft and trying to wash his hair. “I saw a documentary the other day,” he says.

A dozen questions jostle each other on Steve’s face. The one that comes out is, perhaps, the most harmless of the lot. “Oh? Any good?”

Bucky shrugs. “It was okay. Military history. Very… educational.”

Steve seems to take a long time chewing and swallowing. He is double-dipping the soy sauce and using up all the wasabi, and Bucky wants to get mad but can’t find the fuel for it. “If you’re into that sort of thing,” Steve says at last, with audible care, “there’s a new exhibit at the Smithsonian I’ve been meaning to see. Nat says it’s pretty interesting. We could maybe go together.”

Bucky has a fleeting vision of his hands setting fire to a book, and wonders if it is a memory or a hallucination or a divine revelation. Judging by the state of his mind these days, it could be any or all of the three. “Why?”

“I dunno,” says Steve. He catches Bucky’s eye and Bucky tries, though not very hard, to look away. “I’m out of work. So are you. I figure we’ve got time to kill.”

They always do. Bucky glances down, and realises he has somehow shovelled most of the sushi to Steve’s side of the box without noticing. It’s a habit that really needs to stop. “Yeah, fine,” he says. “We might as well.”

  
  


(They go to the museum and look at that one exhibit until closing time, and then they break in after midnight and look at it some more, and then they accidentally set off the alarms and have to run from the cops and Steve buys Bucky burgers and it is as if nothing has changed at all, even if everything has.)

**Author's Note:**

> come say hi on [tumblr](http://dirtybinary.tumblr.com) or check out my [original novel](http://valeaida.tumblr.com/post/149576789996/an-elegy-info-post)!

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[podfic] time to kill](https://archiveofourown.org/works/7221970) by [Annapods](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Annapods/pseuds/Annapods)




End file.
